


to face unafraid

by citruses



Category: The Eagle | Eagle of the Ninth (2011)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-30
Updated: 2012-12-30
Packaged: 2017-11-23 00:56:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/616279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/citruses/pseuds/citruses
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written during my Winter Holiday Commentfic fest at LJ, for Sistermine, who requested Esca, Marcus and a pomegranate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	to face unafraid

**Author's Note:**

> This is a zombie AU story, so a warning for, um, zombies? And another for animal deaths.

It starts with pomegranates. Persephone's fruit -- appropriate enough, for the dying-sickness.   
  
The farm-workers tell each other tales in hushed tones, the stories of their lands, or ones they've heard along their travels: how a man could die and not die, how he would thirst for the flesh of his fellow-man. The news of a plague comes in with every ship that docks nearby.  _It taints crops and infects men,_  say the traders at the horse-markets.  _It spreads from the south._  And then the three labourers who ate the first of this year's pomegranate harvest are all struck down with the same illness.  
  
It makes them mad, it removes the people Esca and Marcus knew from their bodies and leaves a spirit behind that is hungry for blood and savagery. It isn't long before Kurios bites Ulla as she is trying to nurse the three of them, and when her crescent-shaped wound begins to swell and suppurate she comes to Marcus with old, sad eyes in her young mother's face and tells him to quarantine her with them.   
  
Marcus tries to argue at first, but Esca agrees with her, holding her shaking hand as she says,  _I can feel the sickness rising already. You smell different, all of you, you smell_  wonderful --   
  
*  
  
In the end, they lose everyone, and all the crops. Burn body after wasted body, burying the ashes in a copse of trees far from the farm buildings. The horses don't seem to be susceptible to the sickness, nor their cat, but everything that still lives is wasting away for want of food. Marcus holds Esca tightly at night around his thin, thin middle and lets the cat share their bed. Even she -- a terrific scavenger, whom Esca found hiding in a barn-corner when she was a plump little kitten -- is finding less and less food now, losing energy.  
  
When they finally have to kill one of the horses for food, she whinnies almost gratefully as life leaves her, and Esca is glad that Marcus pretends not to notice him crying. They begin to stay together all the time, they're at each other's backs always and it's almost like their journey beyond the wall again, only they are so much older now.   
  
Neither wants to leave the farm, but they have to in the end. They arm themselves with the sharpest tools they can find, argue endlessly about where they ought to go, think but don't talk about the danger of being ambushed by the living-dead creatures. Marcus loads their two strongest horses with packs and then they turn the rest loose on the estate.  
  
Esca holds the cat in his arms for a long time before he finally decides not to try and bring her with them. "Let her follow if she chooses," he says firmly, half to the creature herself, as he lets her go. Marcus puts down what's in his hands and goes to Esca, gathers him in, skin and bone and all the freckled angles of him.  _Let him be all right,_  Marcus thinks like a silent prayer as he presses their thin bodies together bruisingly hard.  _Gods, let us be all right._  
  
*  
  
In the deserted farmhouse to the East of their lands where they first set up camp, there are three well-sealed jars of a sludgy red-brown preserve, which Marcus discovers, upon opening one, to be a tangy chutney flavoured with oranges and pomegranate. He mixes a small portion with water and sets it over their fire to warm like soup. Three of the death-creatures killed on the journey from their farmhouse to here -- Marcus's sword, Esca's dagger, Marcus's makeshift hoe-turned-spear -- and while they prepare to bed down, they discuss pomegranate chutney in calm voices and don't discuss the pomegranate harvest that set their labourers mad with something like death but, impossibly, worse.  
  
The chutney is beginning to bubble and give off a sweet smell when Marcus hears Esca gasp from behind him and whips around lightning-fast, hand gripping his dagger; but it's the cat. Of course it is. She's followed them; she belongs to them.   
  
Marcus remembers lying half-drowned in a British river, how he was at once almost certain that he was going to die, and entirely certain that Esca would come back for him. Vindication, relief and love are mingled in Esca's expression as he cradles the cat reverently in his lean hands. Esca. Marcus breathes in the smell of the death-fruit and looks at the man he has spent his life with, lets the strength flow through him with its changing currents.


End file.
